The U.S. Department of Justice has contacted affected companies about potentially anticompetitive behavior of cable companies toward online video services, according to a source close to the matter.The DOJ's inquiry seems to focus on Comcast and conditions it agreed to in its early 2011 merger with NBCUniversal, said the industry source. Conditions approved by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission prohibit Comcast from disadvantaging rival online video services through its broadband service or set-top boxes.Online video service Netflix, Public Knowledge and other groups have questioned Comcast's decision to exempt its video-on-demand service on the Xbox 360 from its broadband service'[...]

Referred to as China’s Wikipedia,�Hudong.com is a Chinese-language online encyclopedia. The company is reportedly raising a $50 million third round of funding, sources told Fortune.Created in 2005, Hudong.com calls itself the world’s largest Chinese-language wiki with 6.4 million entries. Like Wikipedia, the site houses articles on various topics and accepts submissions from the public.At the beginning of June, Hudong.com announced a partnership with Microsoft’s search engine Bing. The partnership helps Hudong.com gain better search capabilities and gives Microsoft the chance to develop its search engine technology in other countries, which it needs to compete with Google[...]

Creativity apps on Apple’s iOS platform aren’t just a consumer fad — investors want in too. Snapguide, an app that lets anyone create an easy how-to guide with their iPhone, has snapped up a $5 million investment round, according to an SEC filing and later confirmed by CEO Daniel Raffel on Twitter.The Series A round comes from Atlas Venture, Index Ventures and CrunchFund, and arrives not too long after the app’s debut in late March. Snapguide was an insta-hit with DIY-ers, and recently kicked off an integration deal with the other service popular with the creative set, Pinterest. In late April, CEO and co-founder Raffel said the app had “hundreds of thousands o[...]

“Open source only really works if everybody is contributing for their own selfish reasons,”�Torvalds told the BBC in a recent interview.And it’s selfishness that’s had no small part in netting Torvalds Finland?s�Millennium Technology Prize. Torvalds will share the prize with�Japanese stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka, with whom he will also share the prize’s $1.3 million check.“Linus Torvalds?s work has kept the web open for the pursuit of knowledge and for the benefit of humanity – not simply for financial interests,” Ainomaija Haarla, President of Technology Academy Finland said in a statement.Torvalds would agree. Selfishness is, after[...]